“I’m a dorkfish! He caught me on a corndog! I swear to God! I was swimming underneath the ocean and I said “WHAT’S A CORNDOG DOING UNDERNEATH THE OCEAN?!” But you know me I love them dang corndogs!“
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“God doesn’t love me”, is one of the toughest things I’ve heard from fellow believers. I’m not just talking about the fleeting thoughts that affect a large portion of the body of Christ but soon dissipate once the guilt of sin wears off. I’m talking about someone with full confidence that their Father has abandoned them and they’ve been permanently left out of His affections.
It breaks my heart, because I’ve been there. I was trapped in that lie of a mindset for ten years. My life was in complete shambles but the physical circumstances paled in comparison to the devastation of believing I’d never be accepted by God again, that He’d just thrown in the towel.
See, I grew up in a Baptist household and I was saved at a relatively young age. I was taught the “dos” and “do nots” of Christianity but I heard very little about the love of God. I knew Jesus as my Savior but that’s where my view of Him began and ended.
The enemy used the rejection I’d faced in my life involving my family, peers, and especially the church, to convince me that the opinion God held of me was no different.
I couldn’t even use the word Father in prayer without feeling an overwhelming sense of
guilt. Guilt that I could degrade Him by assuming He would ever see me in that light again- if He ever truly had.
If anything in this post resonates with you, there’s something you need to know. God LOVES you. Yes, you! I don’t need a written record of all the terrible things you’ve done because it won’t convince God out of loving you.
The closer I get to Him, the more and more I realize how silly a concept it is that He could hate anyone. Don’t misunderstand me though. Your pain isn’t silly and it’s not something you can just “get over”. Anyone who says otherwise is in desperate need of a large dose of compassion. Your pain is legitimate and it didn’t just manifest out of thin air. It may have been caused by your circumstances, the rejection of other Christians, or just plain deceit from the enemy. Whatever the case, it’s there and it matters.
I can tell you that on the rare occasion I opened up to other Christians about those feelings, I was told I simply “cared too much.” The funny thing was though, God Himself was always full of compassion and He never once condemned me or told me to get over it.
Romans 5:10
For
if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of
His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His
life.
Even as Jesus was being crucified, He cried out to His Father for mercy on the behalf of His executors. He said, “Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do”. Do you realize how powerful a statement that was? If He had a right to hate anyone, it would be the people who were nailing Him to a cross. But He didn’t utter one word in condemnation or anger. The only words that came from His mouth were full of forgiveness and love.
Under the old covenant, there were hundreds of laws you had to follow in order to be fully justified in the sight of God. If you broke one, you broke them all, so it was humanly impossible to be righteous by your own merits. That’s why Jesus paid the penalty for sin, to offer humanity permanent salvation.
When you accept Him as your Savior, you’re instantly translated from the dominion of darkness (Satan’s family) into the kingdom of light. (God’s family) You have a righteousness stronger than the one of the law, because it can’t be wrenched away from you. Your identity is now based on who Jesus is. He not only took your place on the cross but He gave you His, which means you have right standing with God. That standing can’t be altered by your own mistakes, because your salvation isn’t dependent on your works to begin with.
Look at that verse again from Romans. “For if, WHEN WE WERE ENEMIES, we were reconciled to God-” God still wanted you, even when you were His enemy! Why in the world would He discard His own child? He’s all knowing, which means even before your conception, He knew the things you would do.
If the problem stems from other Christians, I want you to know that their behavior is a reflection of THEM, not HIM. God is love and though Christians are meant to represent Him, they certainly don’t speak for Him. If they mistreated you, it’s because they didn’t know enough about their own identity in Christ. It’s not because He condoned the behavior.
There’s a lot of other things I could say about this particular topic but I’ll end the post with this. This isn’t something you can just grasp by sheer willpower. Someone telling you, “Hey, God loves you”, isn’t going to do a thing in the world. It’s the Holy Spirit who really brings revelation to the human heart.
I can tell you that for me, there were a lot of things interfering with my ability to see the truth. Simply reading scriptures did very little. There were things that God needed to remove from my life before I could finally comprehend what He was saying to me.
I promise that if you keep pressing into God, you WILL get your answer. You’re not going to have to try to believe. He’ll make it blatantly obvious to you and it’ll become so deeply rooted in your heart that the lies of the enemy will have no more power over you.
John 6:37
All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out.
Isaiah 49:15-16
“Can a woman forget her nursing child,
And not have compassion on the son of her womb?
Surely they may forget,
Yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands;
Your walls are continually before Me.”
Romans 5:8
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 8:38-39
For
I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor
principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor
height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
1 John 4:8
He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Repeat after me:
“Instead of being a lamb herded into compliance by incompetent politicians, I choose to be part of the solution instead of the problem. I will become proficient in 1 or more firearms in order to protect the ones I love and myself. I will not be defenseless, I will not be a victim.”
The best way to prevent tragedy is to be prepared. If you are anti-gun then you are part of the problem. It’s YOUR laws that get people killed by leaving them defenseless against those who seek to harm others. Being a gun owner doesn’t make somebody a fascist or a psychopath, it makes them a line of defense against evil people with no regard for civilized society.
Be part of the solution, not the problem.
